


When they said repent, I wonder what they meant

by lanyon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-06
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-23 20:09:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1577927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanyon/pseuds/lanyon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The breaking and making of Natalia Alianovna Romanova.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When they said repent, I wonder what they meant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [caughtinanocean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/caughtinanocean/gifts).



> + **Warnings:** This three-chapter story deals with the premise that Natasha was, indeed, born in 1984. Therefore, themes include child abduction and child soldiers/assassins. Please proceed with due caution.  
>  +The title is from Leonard Cohen's _The Future_  
>  +For Alex, who is a legend of our time and who's been a huge support.

It is, she thinks, her earliest memory. It’s real, too. She’s almost sure of that. Her knees are scabbed over and her arms and her legs are chubby. It’s Tatiana’s name day, she thinks, or maybe that was in a book.

She’s wearing a white leotard and a grey tutu and pink ballet shoes and she’s clinging to the neck of a man who is not her father. He holds her in one arm. He’s strong; his grip is like iron and there is a lot of noise. Every so often, a thud ricochets through his body and hers and, now, all these years later, she still knows that it is the recoil of a poorly-serviced AK-47. 

Her next memory is waking up in a dormitory to the quiet crying of seven other girls, gasping sobs and high-pitched keening. She doesn’t cry. 

She wonders where her sisters are, and her brothers. She wonders where her parents are. 

She thinks they might be dead.

Natalia Alianovna Romanova is four years old (and she’s not sure that’s her real name, anyway).

She wakes again to a woman, shaking her roughly awake.

“Mother, no,” she says.

“I’m not your mother,” says the woman, whose face is severe and fat with a corpulence Natalia has never seen in the inhabitants of the apartment block where she lives with her sisters, and her brothers, and her parents. 

“No,” says Natalia. She does not know if she is agreeing or protesting.

.

“You are all very lucky little girls,” they are told, by a tall man wearing a nice suit. He says to call him Sasha but Natalia doesn’t think he means it. Old men are not Sasha, like the little boy who lives down the hall. “You have been chosen because you are all special.” 

Natalia didn’t know that more than one person could be special. 

She looks around the room. There are eight girls and some are tall and some are short and they are blonde and brunette and her hair is still bright like fire and like revolutions that bled out long before she was born.

. 

She doesn’t know how she survives. She never cries. Maybe that’s important. Svetlana is taken away after the first week and she never stopped crying.

Two years pass. Two years of lessons in languages and arithmetic and geography and history. Two years of physical education. 

You are lucky little girls, they are told. You are the flowers of Russia. You will craft her future. She will be proud of you. 

(She cries. She cries in the showers, in the mornings, when they are shouted at and told to clean behind their ears, and she misses her sisters and her brothers; she misses her parents. No one knows she cries. There is soap in her eyes; there is shampoo. She is four years old and she must learn a good way not to die.)

You are lucky little girls, they are told. They do not have dolls or teddy bears. They do not have comfort, beyond thin grey blankets and narrow beds.  
.

Every fortnight, they go to the doctor’s clinic. The doctor is small and squat with a hair growing out of a wart on her chin. The other little girls giggle and say she is a witch and they chorus _ooh_ when Natalia is taken from the dank waiting room. Natalia knows that they are scared and that is why they call her Baba Yaga at night, when they tell fairy tales and horror stories to each other. Natalia tells the best stories. They always believe her and they scream so satisfyingly.

She raises her chin as the doctor examines her. She listens to Natalia’s lungs and her heart and her hands are gentle, even when she pinches her side and feels under her jaw, and down the sides of her neck and under her arms. 

“Fit as a fiddle,” the doctor says. “Time for your shot.” 

Natalia rolls up her sleeve and her jaw clenches only slightly when the needle slides in. She wants to ask why she needs a shot if she’s healthy. She has not been taught to question.

“Just a pinch,” the doctor says, a second too late. 

“You are not scared of me,” says the doctor. 

“You are a doctor,” says Natalia. “You make people better.”

“You aren’t scared of my face?” asks the doctor and she pulls a grotesque expression and Natalia laughs. 

The doctor smiles and it is no less grotesque. 

“You are a brave one, Rizhenkaya.” The doctor tilts her head. “Be careful. Do not be too brave.”

The doctor pulls a chart out from her desk drawer. It is almost as thick as Natalia’s father’s novels. The doctor writes fast and hides the chart away, almost immediately. 

Only briefly, Natalia wonders what it says. She does not think a doctor’s inky scrawl could tell her anything about herself. 

.

Two years pass and there are only five left. Vera, who is pretty and shy, is taken away, and so is Olga and Natalia remains. She never cries. 

(Only sometimes, in the showers, because she cannot remember what her sisters look like, or her brothers, or her parents.)

.

When she is six years old, her morning classes are taught through English; they are applied maths and ballistics and botany. She does not always understand what she is being taught. She eats what they tell her to eat. She goes to the doctor every fortnight. 

When she is six years old, her afternoons are filled with physical tests and intellectual puzzles. 

She learns that everything is a test. She does not need to ask. 

There are eight new girls. They are four years old and they look like babies to her. They are fat and one of them does not stop crying. 

One is quiet though, with long blonde hair. Her eyes are narrowed as she looks around. 

The new girls are taken away to begin their classes.

.

When she is seven years old, three things happen:

The first is that the whole country changes. It becomes more or less (she is not quite sure). They are told that everything is different but she goes to class every day. 

The second is that she is handed a PSM and told to fire it at a target shaped like a man.

The third is that she is formally introduced to Yelena, who is five years old, and still looks at the world through narrowed eyes.

They are playing a game, that is logic and reasoning, and there is a man, who is quiet. He is wearing a jacket, though it’s summer, and gloves. 

“Do you want to play with us?” asks Yelena. 

The man frowns but he does not look angry. He looks confused. Natalia thinks he looks sad. “I don’t know you,” he says, in strange, accented Russian, after too many minutes have passed. He looks down at the board and blinks slowly “I don’t know how.”

“I can teach you,” says Yelena and she explains the game to the man. She explains it three times but he doesn’t seem to understand. He shrugs helplessly. 

“Okay,” says Yelena. “It’s okay.” 

They play and the man’s eyes are far away, fixed on the wall or somewhere beyond.

“When is your birthday?” asks Yelena.

The man shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” says Natalia, in a hurry. “I don’t know when mine is either.”

Yelena squints at them both. “Then when is your name day?”

“September,” says Natalia, because the doctor told her, months ago, when she listened to Natalia’s heart and lungs and pinched her sides and said she was as fit as a fiddle, and that today was her name day.

Natalia wonders how the doctor knew that. She wonders if it means that her name is really Natalia.

They look at the man. 

He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“What is your name?” Yelena asks.

“I don’t know,” he says and there is a furrow between his eyebrows. Natalia wants to touch it. 

The doors open and there is a lot of noise.

“There he is,” says a man, surrounded by soldiers. “See, I told you he can’t have gotten far.”

“You’re lucky, Dima,” says another man, tall and wearing a grey suit. “Sasha would not have forgiven this loss.”

“Hush, Mikhail. My girls were interrogating him, can’t you see?” Dima is jovial, with round, pink cheeks. Natalia doesn’t think that she and Yelena are his girls. She has never seen him before.

Mikhail, whose face is long and severe, snorts. “If they get anything from him, Sasha’s scientists will be in a lot of trouble. They told him that the asset is a blank slate.”

Dima waves at Yelena and Natalia.

Yelena waves back.

.

Another year passes and Natalia is eight. It is 1992 and it is the first time she leaves Russia. The train to Paris takes a long time and she sleeps, curled up on the top bunk of a sleeper carriage. The neon lights outside flicker and fade and then it is black outside, yards and miles of countryside. 

“She is my daughter,” says her handler to the conductor. “We’re going to see her mother’s family in Paris.”

Natalia pretends to be asleep.

Her mother does not have family in Paris. She does not remember what her mother looks like, but she does not cry.

“Do you remember your father?” asks her handler when the conductor leaves.

Natalia doesn’t think he’s supposed to ask those kinds of questions. She doesn’t know what the right answer is. She remembers a tall man, holding her. She remembers her white leotard and grey tutu and pink ballet shoes and she remembers a slender, white scar on the ball of his thumb. She thinks he was a soldier.

She is silent for so long that her handler snorts. 

“Of course you don’t,” he says and he sounds impressed. “Just as well. Your family were all traitors, you know. Traitors to the Soviet Union. You are the price they paid.”

She looks at him and tilts her head to the side. There is a rapid pulse below his jaw. The common carotid artery. She is not strong enough to garotte him but she has a stiletto in her boot. She wonders if he knows that she’s been taught to kill a man. 

She looks down at her feet, swinging back and forth, almost in time with the rocking of the train. 

“Do you love Mother Russia?” asks her handler.

“Yes,” she says, immediately. It is the only acceptable answer. 

He smiles at her, his lips suddenly thin. 

She wonders what he means, that she is the price her family paid. 

.

She is nine years old and she has killed a man. She thinks she should feel remorse or horror at herself but she is alive.

She goes to the doctor every two weeks. 

“You are so tall, Rizhenkaya,” the doctor says. She is thinner than she used to be, and her face is more hollow and her skin is grey-yellow. “So beautiful. You have been so very brave.”

“What is wrong, Doctor?” Natalia asks. 

The doctor smiles. “Nothing. Nothing at all.” She writes a note in Natalia’s chart, which is so thick now, with furled corners. She closes it over and does not hide it as quickly as she used to. _Чёрная вдова_. 

_Itsy bitsy spider_ , Natalia thinks. _Climbed up the waterspout._

.

She is ten years old. She has killed two men. They did not expect it. 

She is told she did it for Russia but she does not know if that is reason enough. 

One day, she is summoned to an office. She has never been here before. Exploration has not been encouraged, in all her years here. Curiosity, they tell her, killed the cat. That’s what the English say. 

She does not think curiosity ever killed a spider. 

“Natalia,” says the man sitting behind the desk. “My name is Sasha.” She thinks she has seen him before but old men are not called Sasha. “I have a job for you,” he says. “Which you must do for your country.” 

Natalia nods, cautiously.

The man smiles at her but it is grim and all too self-satisfied. He pushes a file across the table to her. 

“Her name is Natalia Drakovna,” he says. “And her father has been a traitor to Mother Russia.”

She opens the file and looks at a grainy picture of a pretty girl of about her own age, with raven curls and wide, dark eyes. 

“Yes,” she says, because it is the only acceptable answer.


End file.
